I’ve been doing a great deal of thinking/meditating on how we are all connected. The most basic and obvious is that we are all connected simply by being alive on the same planet. I remind myself of this whenever I start to feel judgmental or start feeling a little superior or inferior to someone else. It is all in my head. This shared earthly experience gives us commonalities that we understand innately: gestures, body language, tones.
I had to laugh when I came across this passage in an 1877 grammar textbook, Higher Lessons in English by Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg:
The Universal Language
“We wish to talk to you today about a language that we never learned from a grammar or a book of any kind. Nor was it ever taught us by parent or by teacher. We came by it naturally and use it without thinking of it.
It is a universal language, and so needs no interpreter. People of all lands and degrees of culture use it; even the brute animals in some measure understand it.
This Natural language is the language of cries, laughter, and tones; the language of the eyes, the nose, the mouth, the whole face; the language of gestures and postures.
The child’s cry tells of its wants; it sob, of grief; its scream, of pain; its laugh, of delight. The boy raises his eyebrows in surprise and his nose in disgust, leans forward in expectation, draws back in fear, makes a fist in anger, and calls or drives away his dog simply by the tone in which he speaks.
But feelings and desires are not the only things we wish to communicate. Early in life we begin to acquire knowledge and learn to think, and then we feel the need of a better language.” (p.15)